Monday, May 29, 2006

Memorial Day Weekend

While a long weekend of nothing other than sitting staring at the TV and not moving would have been welcome after the last few weeks, I won't complain about the great weekend we had with friends and family. Flew back Thursday night to beat the Friday night pre-holiday airport nightmare and made it back only an hour or so later than scheduled. Worked from home Friday except for a trip into Research Triangle Park that I'll tell you about later (maybe) then met G and D for dinner at City Beverage in Durham. This was their first time there and we're always a little nervous about recommending places to our friends but they seemed to really love it (we certainly do!).

Saturday we got up and drove up to Yancey County to see my family - Dad's birthday was last week so we had a cookout at his place. My sister's family was there and we had a chance to see my nephew (who I have now nicknamed "Sailor Moon"). He doesn't leave for Great Lakes as soon as I thought, not until July, so we'll miss each other. Probably not a problem since as I understand it he'll get no leave during the 8 weeks of basic there. Then it's off to Pensacola for 14 weeks of real training. He seems pretty realistically psyched about the whole thing, so I'm sure he'll do fine.

Sunday we drove over to Mom's for brunch and to visit a bit, then headed up the Blue Ridge Parkway on a gorgeous spring day to Blowing Rock before heading on home. Today was the low-key day - spent most of it wading through a washtub full of Coronas on the back porch and visiting with J's mom and her boyfriend (her Mom's, not J's). Popped a couple of ears of corn and some veggie bratwursts on the grill and basically didn't move much. I did unfortunately keep thinking about all the work that I had intended to try to do this weekend, but after about the fifth Corona those thoughts receded.

Now I just keep thinking that I'm really not ready to fly back to Chicago tomorrow evening.